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Comment by nsky-world | Hacker News Reader

So your question what's the advantage of cluster comparing to one processor unit?

You could get an off-the-shelf x86 machine in the same form factor and run the cluster nodes in VMs, for instance.

Maybe you could argue that four RPis on a network are more reliable than a single x86 with VMs, but that doesn't seem to be the point of this machine.

That's one of the point too. We have industrial customers who deploy apps in the places with a limited access to the internet, so increased reliability something important to them. Another thing is that they can host apps with different purposes on different nodes in containers. Besides that all the infrastructure could be managed with a tool like Kubernetes and organically work with existing cloud infrastructure. And the last but not least in a cluster like that you can combine general purpose modules with accelerated compute modules.

That's really nice. There are high-end products out there with redundant backplanes (dual or triple) and redundant PSUs (2 or more). To match that level of redundancy it seems you would need 4x Turing Pi, to be able to survive a simultaneous failure of 1x arbitrary PSU and failure of 1x arbitrary backplane (ie. the integrated RTL8370 GigE switch).

The 2x external GigE ports on the Turing Pi helps a lot, in that each cluster can connect simultaneously to 2 external GigE switches, in case one of those things fails.

Could be an interesting exercise to set up and get it all working, in particular K3s + dynamic routing might be a fun challenge.

Theoretically yes, but there seem to be only 2 PCIe (and probably x1 slots). And the interconnect will be quite slower (I suspect) btw. the modules. All those GPIO pins are gonna be wasted and if I am going to commercially deploy containers for customers, I'd rather get a solid industrial Ryzen/Intel fanless solution and call it a day

There is nothing in the schematics about multiple power supplies or battery backups, etc. If you are hooking up all 4 rpis to the same power source , might as well replace it with one x86 processor.

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